New Google Ads Will Let You Try Games Before You Install

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New Google Ads Will Let You Try Games Before You Install

Google

Recently Google announced “app streaming,” a feature that allows users to access apps without having to go through the hassle of downloading them. Now, the company will apply that same technology to ads, which may sound boring, until you consider the ancillary benefit to you, smartphone time-waster: free game trials.

The previous app streaming announcement, which so far remains a very limited trial, has serious implications for the future of information-based apps—once Google has indexed what’s inside them, do they need to exist?—and applies to Google’s search product. This new iteration, though, helps advertisers make their placements stand out in increasingly crowded mobile browsers.

That means you’ll soon be seeing ads called Interactive Interstitials, built in HTML5-rich environments, that enable everything from slideshows that end in exclusive offers to on-screen scratch-off tickets.

“Rather than just telling a user about your app, you can offer them an experience unique to your app that inspires them to want to spend time with your app,” writes Google in an blog post announcing the feature.

The distinction between these ads and apps streaming as the result of a search is that while the latter offers full app-equivalent experiences, Interactive Interstitials act as small tastes of what apps can offer. One is about streamlining the mobile experience to the point of obviating app downloads altogether; the other counterbalances that by nudging you to install.

There’s going to be some tension between search-based and ad-based app streaming for information-packed, redundant apps like hotel listings and recipe books and so on, as developers decide whether to pay for streaming placement, or to let Google index their app-only content and pray to the SEO gods, or both.

Where there will zero tension, though, is games. You can’t index Candy Crush and serve it up as part of Google Now (at least...not yet?). Games are a class of application that will always have a place on your phone. In this case, with what Google’s calling Trial Run Ads, that place is a minute-long trial to get a sense of the game before you commit to finding it a place in your app drawer.

As it turns out, that’s a win for everybody. “Users get a taste of the game before going through the download process,” says Google’s post, “and the app developer attracts better qualified users who’ve chosen the game based on their experiences in the app.”

Being able to test drive a game is particularly useful because games tend to be larger files, meaning they take longer to download and take up more space on your smartphone. The potential downside? Streaming these ads would potentially chew through a significant amount of cellular data. Streaming apps in search only work over Wi-Fi for that reason, and to ensure an experience as comparable to a native app as possible. According to a Google spokesperson, both Trial Run Ads and Interactive Interstitials work over either Wi-Fi or LTE.

Both ad types are currently in beta, and are only being offered to a “limited set of advertisers” for now. If it manages to increase engagement, though, you can expect to see a lot of it. It’s good news for advertisers, and great news for people looking for a new way to kill a little time waiting for the train. Just make sure you're not on a cellular network when you do.